Curtis Luck disqualified after missing tee time on Korn Ferry Tour
By Matt Coles
Ever heard of a professional being disqualified for missing his tee time? Meet Korn Ferry Tour player Curtis Luck…
Get there five minutes before. Be ready to tee off. It’s the usual process. Not, though, for Curtis Luck. He was disqualified for missing his tee time on the Korn Ferry Tour.
Luck was scheduled to tee off at 7.45am on the first day at the Albertsons Boise Open but missed his slot and was kicked out of the event – even though he was on site.
“I just flat-out misread my tee time,” the former US Amateur Champion told Golf Digest.
“I thought I was off at 7.55 a.m. and I was just on the range finishing my warm-up. I actually started walking to the tee at 7.46 a.m.”
“It is very unfortunate that I was on site and didn’t make it.”
Rule 5.3 says a player must start their round at their starting time. If they don’t, they’re disqualified except in three cases: they are ready to play no more than five minutes late, or no more than five minutes early, or the competition committee decides that “exceptional circumstances prevented the player from starting on time”.
The first two exceptions come with a two-shot sanction attached, and not disqualification, but none of them applied to Luck.
The Albertson Boise Open is the first of four tournaments in the Korn Ferry Finals.
A hundred and 44 players will make it through to next week’s Simmons Bank Open, with 120 qualifying for the penultimate event of the season, the Nationwide Children’s Hospital Championship.
Seventy five make it through to the Korn Ferry Tour Championship, in early October. The top 30 finishers will receive PGA Tour cards.
“I’ll just show up in Nashville and then Columbus and keep throwing everything I’ve got at the playoffs,” Luck added.
“Columbus is my favourite on the Korn Ferry Tour. So I just have to keep pressing on.”
Luck was the victor in Columbus at the Nationwide Children’s Hospital Championship in 2020.
Have you ever missed a tee time? If so, what was your reason? Let us know by tagging us on X, previously known as Twitter!
Matt Coles
Mention a European country, and Matt will tell you which resorts make the National Club Golfer Top 100s: European Resorts list. He might even throw in who designed the golf course and how many rooms the hotel has got at each one…
Matt got into the game of golf from a young age, following his old man to the local golf club. He fell for the sport, and now can’t seem to go a day without thinking about how to improve his game (Thanks Dad!). Matt has been a member of Howley Hall GC in Leeds since 2020, and is just about managing to maintain a single-figure handicap. He likes to remind people that he once broke 75, but won’t tell people that it was on a shortened course during the winter.
He moved to Leeds after graduating from the University of Central Lancashire with a First Class Honours degree in Sports Journalism. Matt joined NCG after almost five years travelling the world with the Professional Squash Association, working on events in all four corners of the globe.
Matt currently plays a Cobra King LTDx driver and RadSpeed 3-wood. TaylorMade monopolise the rest of his bag, with a SIM UDI, M5 irons and both Milled Grind and HI-TOE wedges, along with a Monza Redline putter. He uses a Vice Pro Plus golf ball, because he’s a bit different…
Away from golf, Matt is a Manchester United fan, and a keen runner, having ran the Rob Burrow Leeds Marathon (his first and possibly last), in May 2023.
